Improvements to OmniFocus Task-level Keyboard Navigation

OmniFocus
#1

There are a ton of things that keep me on OmniFocus, but one of the things that I really like about the way that Things 3 does task management is that a ton of navigation for individual tasks is possible from the keyboard, without needing to lift my hands and grab my mouse. For example, with a task highlighted, there is a shortcut to quickly jump to the following fields in Things 3 that you have to tab-tab-tab over to in OmniFocus:

  • The “Tags” field - CMD+SHIFT+T
  • The “Projects” field - CMD+SHIFT+M
  • The “Deadline” field (similar to the “Due” field in OF) - CMD+SHIFT+D
  • The “When” field (similar to the “Defer” field in OF) - CMD+S
  • The “Checklist” field (similar to creating a task nested within a task in OF) - CMD+SHIFT+C

I’m not saying that the shortcuts themselves need to be the same, but there really should be a better way to navigate directly to the field you want to edit without needing to manually open the inspector or tab-tab-tab over to the field you want (and there are a variety of fields in the inspector pane which are just ripe for keyboard shortcuts). Should this be improved in the future, I’d also like for the same improvements to carry over to the Quick Entry modal on the Mac, which could similarly benefit from such improvements.

1 Like
#2

I take back the “Checklist” request; that is kind-of possible with “CMD+SHIFT+]” on the Mac. I think the rest of my request still stands, though.

#3

Improved keyboard navigation is one of the bullet points from the Omni Group 2019 roadmap announcement:

In the second to last paragraph at the bottom of the blog post:

…the overall theme of our work for 2019 across all our product lines will be to improve the flow of using our apps. We’ll be reviewing the ways customers navigate our apps—making them easier to navigate on small touch devices, more efficient to use from a keyboard, and more accessible to the sight-impaired.

#4

@wilsonng well that’s promising, must’ve blocked that out of my memory; thanks for the link! Worth getting my thoughts out there though 😅

1 Like
#5

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.